With that freedom comes a responsibility to acknowledge it and to not act like complete idiots. Unfortunately, even the rich to a large extent aren't aware of how rich they truly are.
Sorry I refuse to believe in this victim hood mentality. We seriously need to get out of this 'Somebody needs to do it for me' ideology. Nobody is going to help you and shouldn't. Because frankly no matter whom you can speak to is going through a little battle of their own.
I am working hard here pushing 19 hour schedules to ensure I have a good life. Somebody else is all welcome to do so. I can understand if the person is ill or is physically disabled. But a healthy person who doesn't work hard deserves his condition.
And in a country like India, expecting somebody to come and help is not a unrealistic expectation but a 'unjust' expectation.
>>By comparison those who have acquired sufficient wealth are free to do whatever they please!
You make acquiring wealth sound like somebody just woke up one day and found a sack of gold biscuits at their door step.
>>With that freedom comes a responsibility to acknowledge it and to not act like complete idiots
Exactly.
There by each man for his own and shall deserve net result of his own work.
>>Unfortunately, even the rich to a large extent aren't aware of how rich they truly are.
Because nothing is really enough but that's a totally different discussion altogether.
> I am working hard here pushing 19 hour schedules to ensure I have a good life. Somebody else is all welcome to do so. I can understand if the person is ill or is physically disabled. But a healthy person who doesn't work hard deserves his condition.
> And in a country like India, expecting somebody to come and help is not a unrealistic expectation but a 'unjust' expectation.
I think you misunderstood what he's talking about. India isn't the United States.
Until recently India had a rigid caste system where it was simply impossible for people to move outside of their caste. If a person's parents were laborers, they became laborers - that was their caste. It had nothing to do with how hard they worked or if other people helped them. Their caste was "laborer," so that's the only job they'd be able to get.
It's not as strict as it used to be, and it's slowly dying out, but it does still exist.
Caste system is a option, you can either associate yourself to it or leave it. This is true at least in modern day India and has been the the case for nearly 20 years now. You can easily ditch your caste, just like atheists ditch their religion.
The fact is caste system offers a comfortable cushion of victim hood and gives you enough reasons to justify failure or even not trying.
These days belonging to a lower caste is a gift because you get reservations nearly every where. There are protests by many communities to include them in back ward communities because of the reservations. People are fighting to be backward, Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Gurjar_unrest_in_Rajasthan
The situation is such that people want to belong to backward communities and castes.
True freedom is dangerous, many people know it, and they don't even want it.
Caste system is not just reservations/backward communities. It includes the different sub-castes (Ex - Different sub-castes in the Brahmin caste). This is very relevant in vote bank politics. A candidate belonging to sub-caste X will not get elected if the region has majority people from sub-caste Y, even if the candidate is known to be capable.
The main reason for the terrible infrastructure conditions in India is politics and corruption. These are strongly rooted in the caste/sub-caste system. Money has always been flowing freely in politics and it is what makes politics attractive.
The terrible infrastructure I refer to is basic - water, electricity, medicines. Malls, fancy cars cannot substitute water. In India, People are dying for water these days. This will only increase exponentially. There has been research showing that 24 hour water supply is possible with the current fresh water resources in India, but it won't happen, thanks to politics, corruption and the caste system.
The SUV situation brought up in the article is not caste based. It was money based and money is the new, bonus caste system on top of existing ones.
They don't really know another way of life. That is all they have ever been exposed to. They don't know about Apple/Google/iPhone or Steve Jobs or what a computer is because their village is so fucking remote that the Government of India decided it would be a hassle to provide electricity, and their parents decided to make additional income by renting out a few kids to make ends meet.
These people don't really consider themselves victims, because they don't think they have been wronged. They were mostly unlucky in the lottery of life and born in poor circumstances.
You can refuse to believe whatever you want but the fact is that you were extremely lucky in life to be either born in a relatively well to do family or in circumstances that exposed you technology, educational experiences over the course of your life. Having an internet connection can be a life changing effect, because of the access to information it provides.
>> Nobody is going to help you and shouldn't.
>> But a healthy person who doesn't work hard deserves his condition.
>> expecting somebody to come and help is not a unrealistic expectation but a 'unjust' expectation.
>> There by each man for his own and shall deserve net result of his own work.
^^ I am glad that everyone doesn't think like you because the world truly would be an awful place if they did.
I never denied that. My whole point was, now that you are- What next?
If you think you are happy with poverty then the story ends there. If you aren't then, the government can do little, Sorry but there are simply too many people in our country. The ordinary citizen will not and can't do anything about you.
It will be your and your problem alone.
It will be difficult, hard and a tiring lifelong worth of work. Just like it is for everybody else.
What else were you thinking?
The situation is very similar in South Africa. The poor makes up such a large proportion of the population that their situation cannot be improved significantly without major wealth redistribution (combined with a massive reduction in government corruption, preferably). Neither of these things are likely to happen (unless there is a revolution), so a poor person can only realisticly rely on himself to improve his situation.
Kamaal's point does not contradict the OP's. It's just a statement of reality from the perspective of the poor.
Arguing they have only themselves to rely on, feels like a rationalisation to not help them.
EDIT: I see where you're coming from now that I've seen his higher-up posts.
Not to mention that in the end, even if everyone did 'just work hard', there isn't enough wealth to go around. The civilised thing is at least to give people basic services and let themselves work to higher wealth from there.
And I am not saying that most poor people expect handouts. If anything I would guess that most of them are hard-working. I only brought it up because of the parent post. I realise I owe my own middle-class status to the fact that my parents are middle-class.
And I am all for the well-off helping the poor. I only wish the (South African, in my case) government would do their part.
My position is less about handouts, and more about the assumption that poor people know how to get out of poverty and all that's missing is the elbow grease. Yes, relying on the government for handouts isn't going to work, and you also want to be careful of welfare dependence. But education is a significant wealth-enabler, and merely knowing how to deal with various things can give people a leg up. Kamaal's point is about giving a giant shrug and saying "eh, what can you do?". It reflects the current realities of the situation, but the lazy part is not bothering to think of better ways forward.
Though one often reads that acquiring/making wealth isn't a zero sum game.
There was actually a revolution. When I was a kid, Nelson Mandela was in jail. Did the revolution improve matters?
One thing is very different between .in and .za: .za is one of the most violent countries in the world, while .in is one of the least violent.
(b) to recognize the caste system, you have to go somewhere it doesn't exist. Right now you know as much about it as a typical fish knows about water.
(c) we're human beings, and none of us gets ahead alone; we all have people to help us. We can't even survive infancy without help from other people. The people a kilometer from you who have expensive SUVs without having to work 19-hour days? That's mostly because they got a lot of help from other people, such as their parents, and only partly because they worked hard — in some cases, not at all. Working hard is really, really important, but far from enough.
Many unmarried techies live in the same apartment and share a room and still have a maid/servant. These guys earn $500-$1000usd a month. They have a TV but it isn't a flat screen. They have a decent mobile phone but it is not an iphone 5. They might have a decent motorcycle but not a car..
They split the cost of the servant who comes from another part of India. The servant might cost $150 a month, split 4 ways. The techies are not above middle class at all. The guy they employee is just really poor.
Make a million dollars a year, and you can go to all the charity balls and opera galas you want. And your kids can go to whatever prep school you want to send them to. That tells me it's about your wallet, not where your parents went to school.
The article takes one event, and then reapplies it liberally to a popular narrative.
I could never have imagined that this was HN material.
Care to elaborate on said traits?
To save so much that you ultimately have a lot but spend none of it.
No, they've got it right. The distinction between middle class and lower class is entirely about wealth, but the distinction between middle class and upper class is not. Wealth is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for being upper class; the distinguishing features are flexibility and power, not money. It is possible to convert money into these things, but most middle-class people who acquire sufficient wealth nevertheless fail to become upper-class because they lack the mental toolkit, or are embedded in power structures that won't let them.